Among the strangest of the rumours circulating about early Methodism was the charge that it promoted the notion of Christian communism—‘the community of goods’. In the early summer of 1739 Lord Egmonc, one of the Georgia Trustees, got wind of the story and after hearing Whiteficld preach at Blackheath pressed him whether, among other eccentricities, he held that ‘all things should be in common’. The same year two anti-Methodist pamphlets raised the same issue, and in 1740 it surfaced again in the papers when another former Oxford Methodist, Benjamin Ingham, was accused by his local vicar of helping to foment a violent riot of Dewsbury cloth workers by ‘preaching up … a community of goods, as was practised by the Primitive Christians’. Ingham was said to urge a sharing of wealth so drastic that his brother had remarked in disgust, ‘if I mind our Ben, he would preach me out of all I have’.

In 1884, the American Historical Association was founded. Four years later, in 1888, the American Society of Church History came into being. The two events, the founding of the ASCH as well as of the AHA, belong to the larger saga of late nineteenth century professional formation. In field after field, amateur and patrician endeavours fell before what seemed a common strategy to consolidate, standardize, resource, institutionalize, and professionalize. The relation of the ASCH to the AHA is instructive. The two organizations shared much. Both drew significantly upon the idiom and structures of German historical scholarship. The guiding spirit of the AHA, Herbert Baxter Adams, plied his German training in a research seminar at Johns Hopkins whose methods and graduates swept historical efforts across the nation into the AHA orbit. His counterpart, Philip Schaff, conceived the ASCH in comparable instrumental and imperialistic terms. German-born, trained by Ferdinand Christian Baur and Johann A. W. Neander, Schaff put an indelible mark on the field of church history. The scholarship attests the leadership and legacy: a 13-volume American Church History Series (1893-7), his own 6-volume History of the Christian Church (1882-92), a 3-volumc Religious Encyclopaedia (1882-4), adapted from that of J.J. Hcrzog, the 3-volumc Creeds of Christendom (1877), and the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, the two series of which ran to 28 and 14 volumes (1886-9, 1890–1900).

Unlike English and American Puritanism, German Pietism has hardly ever been used as an example in works on religious sociology and general modern history. Max Weber, in his famous study on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, first published in 1904–5, pointed out that Pietism in Germany was, with regard to his thesis, in many ways similar to Puritanism in England and America. Yet those following the Weberian tradition and most of those studying religious sociology, or writing general modern history, rarely pay attention to German Pietism. This has meant that, first, most of the research on Pietism has been and is still being done by church historians. Accordingly, in works other than on church history, little can be found on Pietism. Second, until now there has been no thorough analysis or comprehensive description of the impact of Pietism on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German society, culture, politics, or economics. Third, certain specific Pietist concepts, such as the concepts of ‘community’ and ‘work’, which possess a central position in modern sociology and were influential far beyond the ranks of the Pietists themselves, have not been investigated and thereby introduced into comparative studies.

In his famous essay on von Ranke‘s history of the Popes, Thomas Babington Macaulay remarked that the ‘ignorant enthusiast whom the Anglican Church makes an enemy… the Catholic Church makes a champion’. ‘Place Ignatius Loyola at Oxford. He is certain to become the head of a formidable secession. Place John Wesley at Rome. He is certain to be the first General of a new Society devoted to the interests and honour of the Church.’ Macaulay’s general argument that Roman Catholicism ‘unites in herself all the strength of establishment, and all the strength of dissent’, depends for its force on his comparison of the Catholic Regular Orders with the popular preachers of Nonconformity. As the son of a leader of the Clapham Sect, his witness in the matter has its interest for scholars of the Evangelical Revival, and has been echoed by Ronald Knox in his parallel between Wesley and the seventeenth-century Jesuit, Paolo Segneri, who walked barefoot 800 miles a year to preach missions in the dioceses of northern Italy. More recently the comparison has been drawn again by Owen Chadwick, with the judgement that the ‘heirs of the Counter-Reformation sometimes astound by likeness of behaviour to that found in the heirs of the Reformation’, and Chadwick’s volume on the eighteenth-century Popes contains some fascinating material on the resemblances between the religion of the peoples of England and of Italy. An historian of Spanish Catholicism has compared the Moravians and the mission preachers of eighteenth-century Spain, not least in their rejection of modern commercialism, while an American scholar has traced some of the parallels between nineteenth-century Protestant and Catholic revivalism in the United States. Not that Wesleyan historians have been attracted to study the great movements of revival religion in the Catholic countries in Wesley’s lifetime—a neglect which is hardly surprising. One point of origin of the Evangelical revival was among refugees from Roman Catholic persecution, and for all the popular confusion, encouraged by men like Bishop Lavington, between Methodists and Papists, and for all Wesley’s belief in religious toleration and tenderness for certain Catholic saints and devotional classics, he was deeply hostile to the Roman Catholic Church, as David Hempton has recently shown. Yet there are many points of likeness as well as difference between the enthusiasts of Protestant and Catholic Europe, and both these need to be declared if Catholics and Protestants are ever to attempt to write an ecumenical history.

To ask the questions how we remember familiar historical figures and how they would like to have been remembered befits, perhaps, a collection of essays like this one. For us today, Herder is important as one of the leading literary figures of the German Sturm una Drang. He made seminal contributions as a philologist and linguistic ethnographer, as an aesthete and critic. We think of him, too, as a Christian philosopher who questioned, like his dear friend, Hamann, the sceptical empiricism of Hume, and, more especially, their own teacher, Kant, who had brought Hume to their notice. Historians see Herder as the father of the idea of history as it is experienced and interpreted by each generation, and as the progenitor of our modern romantic and nationalist movements.

The present-day exchange of British and German research into church history can hardly be described as flourishing. Very seldom are historical topics from the other country ever investigated. This even applies to those areas where the paths of German and British church history have met. One notable exception is Professor Reginald Ward, who has not only striven to establish contacts with German church historians, but has also himself published a number of works on German church history. It is therefore only fitting to express appreciation of such amicable relations through the years by a study of German-British history. The scope for such a study embraces the fields of Pietism, Methodism, and the revival movement.

In June 1799 the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland issued a Pastoral Admonition to its congregations denouncing the missionaries of the newly formed Society for Propagating the Gospel at Home (SPGH). They were, it alleged, ‘a set of men whose proceedings threatened] no small disorder to the country’. In issuing this warning the Assembly brought to public attention for the first time the work of two of the most prominent Scottish leaders of the Evangelical Revival, Robert and James Alexander Haldane. The Haldane brothers, two of the moving spirits behind the offending organization, were wealthy Presbyterian converts to an undenominational activism already much in evidence south of the border. For a decade spanning the turn of the century their religious enterprise challenged Scottish ecclesiastical conventions, provoking strong contemporary reactions and leading to a marked divergence in subsequent historical assessment. From ‘the Wesley and Whitefield of Scotland’, at one extreme, they have been described less fulsomely as the source of a movement which, though it alarmed all the Presbyterian churches, proved to be short-lived, dying away ‘among its own domestic quarrels’, ‘marred by bitterness of speech, obscurantism and fanaticism’. Contemporaries seem to have found it little easier to agree on the leaders’ personal qualities. In 1796 Thomas Jones, the minister of Lady Glenorchy’s Chapel in Edinburgh, commended Robert Haldane to William Wilberforce as ‘a man of strickt honour integrity religion prudence and virtue’, who being ‘possessed of a fortune from £50,000 to £60,000 … thinks it is his duty… to employ a considerable portion of it in promoting the cause of God’. By 1809 Haldane’s former friend and colleague, Greville Ewing, had become so disenchanted with his methods that, having referred to him scornfully as ‘the POPE of independents’, he accused him bitterly of ‘the greatest effort [he had ever seen] from any motive whatsoever, to ruin the comfort, and the usefulness, of a minister of the gospel’. Though his brother, James, appears to have inspired a more universal affection, the forcefulness of both personalities ensured that mere neutrality would never be easy.

The Church of England Clerical and Lay Association (Western District) for the maintenance of Evangelical Principles was started in 1858 as part of a ‘more comprehensive plan for a general organized association’ of Anglican Evangelicals. The case for such an association was graphically made by an anonymous clerical pamphleteer:

It is religious Nonconformity’s fate to be misknown. Where it truly non-conforms the historian of the mainstream must find it an irritant, a tiresomely indispensable footnote to his thesis. For other historians it is its eccentricities which appeal—its Muggletonians and Southcottians, its Ranters too. What is less appealing is its most insistent theme and its chief continuity, the constant fight for due recognition (which means parity) in constant tension with the natural urge to conform. For who is to say when Nonconformity has served its purpose or when conformity is indeed reconcilable with that higher conformity to which each Nonconformist witnesses?

The churches know by intimate neighbourhood with the people in every part of Ireland the true aims of those who clamour for separation. They see the effects of so-called Nationalism on morals, on character, on society, on the rights of property, and not least, on Christian institutions. Their estimate of Home Rule is the product of many influences. Observation, experience, intuition, historical facts, and facts of daily life—all contribute their part toward that fulness of conviction which they alike own and maintain. Such a solidarity of opinion does not exist on any other public question.

Anyone who sets out to examine the theology behind Nonconformist social thought and action in the late nineteenth century has to answer two questions: Did such a theology exist? and Was it important? The second question is more fundamental. Twenty years ago John Kent argued that the realities of politics put an increasing strain on the late Victorian claim to a Christian conscience in public affairs, and that in any case Nonconformists did not enjoy a monopoly of moral concern in politics. Like other Liberals, they ‘found themselves trying to reconcile the older Cobden-type ideals of liberty, peace, arbitration and anti-militarism with a new belief in the positive values of an allegedly Christian British Empire’. The result was that ‘the struggle for political power coarsened their moral sensibility’. In such an analysis the emphasis falls on action rather than thought, and in domestic affairs particularly on the political campaigns for social purity, temperance, or against gambling, where they are easily dismissed as the result of evangelical pietism, class moralism, or social reaction. David Bebbington deliberately eschewed theology in his study of the Nonconformist Conscience. ‘Because the focus is on political issues that concerned Nonconformists en masse’, he wrote, ‘the theological views of their leaders, and even their versions of the social gospel, do not loom large.’ In his thesis he also commented that ‘theology was largely unfashionable, even in sermons’, citing Charles Berry, a leading Congregationalist, as an example. Nevertheless, he did not deny that there was a theology.

Prophecy is inescapably controversial; tension is always in the air. Prophetic utterance, no doubt properly, is apt to make many historians irritable and uncomfortable. Preoccupied with the past, the last thing they want to be saddled with is any responsibility for discerning the future or even seeking to make sense of the present. When Hugh Trevor-Roper, as he then was, attacked the writings of Arnold Toynbee in a savage article in Encounter in 1957, the gravamen of his charge was that Toynbee was not a historian at all, but a prophet, and, for good measure, a false one at that. Decent historians should not bother with the ten volumes of A Study of History because they were not history. The charges, in detail, may well have been justified, but the asperity went deeper. The caste of mind of historians, if they were truly professional, should make ‘prophetic history’ an impossibility. Prophets were indifferent to ‘facts’, or cavalier in their treatment of them, in pursuit of a grand vision. Historians, on the other hand, were obsessively fussy about details and were relatively unconcerned about grand theory. Indeed, historiography had ‘come of age’ precisely to the extent that it emancipated itself from prophecy.

The history of Evangelicalism, as Professor Ward has taught us, is greatly illuminated by international comparisons. Britain and America in particular have shared a form of conversionist Protestantism with a common origin and many parallel developments. The study of popular religion in each sheds light on similar phenomena in the other. Comparison also helps our understanding of the differences between the two. Fundamentalism is a case in point. The assertive defence of the faith in inter-war America had echoes in Britain, but the echoes were much softer. The series of booklets called The Fundamentals (1910-15) that gave the movement its name had British as well as American contributors. Yet the militant temper, the polemic in defence of biblical infallibility, and the urge to save Christian civilization from decadence were much more salient in America. Fundamentalism of this kind did exist in Britain, but it was a much weaker force than in the United States.

Guilt has proved an irresistible category for making and interpreting the twentieth-century history of which Germany has been the focus. In that history individuals, organizations, and nations have become guilty. The history of guilt is not made by the wrongdoers alone, but also by those who judge them. Doing wrong and being moralistic often have an evil symbiosis in individuals and communities. Guilt has not always been accurately allocated, and accusations of guilt have been manipulated for political purposes so producing more complex evil. There was guilt for the First World War, but it was untruthfully imposed on Germany alone by Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty. Within Germany, assigning guilt to political opponents, while refusing to accept any responsibility for what had happened, intensified the divisions within the nation and ensured that its policies were inspired by inward as well as outward enmity and unreality. The theologian H. J. Iwand argued in 1954 that the Nazis had taken the Freund-Feind conception of politics to absurdity, blaming (versündigt) the Left for all that happened after 1918. Consequently, Iwand judged the nationalist front in the Weimar Republic to have represented die organisierte Unbussfertigkeit of the German people. Too late, after 1945, it had become politically clear to many, but not to all, that complex historical guilt must be met by a complex response lest its power escalate yet again beyond the control of truth, understanding, and humanity.